Garrison lives with his attractive blond
wife Elizabeth and five young children in a handsome two-storied
home near Lake Pontchartrain, where house prices run from $40,000
to $75,000. (Both his home and office phones, he declares, are
tapped.) He keeps in good physical shape by frequent visits to
the New Orleans Athletic Club and by practicing isometric exercises.
When the load of work becomes too pressing, he will fly to Las
Vegas, Palm Springs, or Phoenix for a two-day vacation and return
revitalized.
In his spare time Garrison indulges his passion
for chess, although he has complained to the author that "since
this probe got under way I practically never have time for a
good game." Garrison compares his current investigation
to a complex chess game: "What it took to solve this puzzle
was imagination and evaluation. It was like a chess gameand
I once played an expert eight hours to a draw."
Garrison prefers to live well, and his taste
is flawless in everything from his clothes (Brooks Brothers)
to his food and drink (French hautecuisine, vintage
wines, the best bourbon). Garrison is a faithful family man,
devoted to his wife and children, but according to Rosemary James
and Jack Wardlaw: "The D.A. likes to be surrounded by attractive
women and one of the legends about his office is that only good-looking
girls are hired as secretaries. The legend has some foundation
in fact; Garrison's office has more good-looking secretaries,
some young, some not so young, than any other office in town."
(16)
He reads omnivorously, often into the early
hours of the morning, and widely; his interests encompass everything
from Ibsen and Shakespeare to Shirer'sThe
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The subject of totalitarianism
is of particular interest to him, and he has an extensive library
of books on fascism. Garrison today claims to see a distinct
parallel between what happened in Germany and Italy and current
trends in the United States.
He warns:

We . . . are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist
state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the
one the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised
bread and work while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging
from prosperity. But in the final analysis it's based on power
and the inability to put human goals and human conscience above
the dictates of the state . . . Of course, you can't spot this
trend . . . The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents?
In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process
is more subtle, but the end results can be the same . . . Huey
Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name
of antifascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience,
that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
(17)

Garrison's concern with the fate of the
individual in the modern industrialized state is not of recent
vintage. Several years ago he wrote a foreword to a legal textbook,
Crime, Law and Corrections, edited by Ralph Slovenko,
in which he said:

The ancient problem of man's conduct has been converted by
his own technology into the critical question of his survival
on the planet . . . . History shows that man is the most savage,
brutal creature to walk the earth since the dawn of time, and
his vaunted rationality has merely increased his capability for
bestiality. Such reason as he possesses has produced the cross,
the bowl of hemlock, the gallows, the rack, the gibbet, the guillotine,
the sword, the machine gun, the electric chair, the hand-grenade,
the personnel mine, the flame thrower, poison gas, the nearly
obsolete T.N.T. bomb, the obsolescent atom bomb and the currently
popular hydrogen bomball made to maim or destroy his fellow
man. [Garrison told the author that he now regrets one omission
from this catalog of man-made horrors: napalm.]

"Whether we survive the Thermonuclear
Age," he soberly observes, "may come down to the simple
question of whether we learn to care about our fellow men."
This is Jim Garrison: prosecutor and philosopher,
Bourbon Street bon vivant and student of history, law
enforcement official and defender of the individual against the
state, ambitious politician and iconoclast ready to sacrifice
career for principle. A complex man, a multifaceted man. And,
right or wrong, not the man of the newspapers and the one-minute
TV news capsules, not a charlatan and not a saint. If Jim Garrison
fails to prove his case, he will go down as a dismal footnote
in the history books. If he succeeds, he will be history.
This is his story.

16 James and Wardlaw, op. cit., p.
26.
17 Playboy, October, 1967.

from pages 37 - 42

Immediately following Ferrie's death, Jack
S. Martin, "bishop" of the "Orthodox Old Catholic
Church of North America," in which the late bewigged pilot-psychologist-cancer-researcher
had claimed to be a clergyman, reappeared. However, before considering
Martin in more general terms, attention should be concentrated
on the ubiquitous and shadowy presence of the various faces of
the Old Catholic Church, which, under diverse designationsincluding
the Old Roman Catholic Church, the Apostolic Orthodox Old Catholic
Church, the Catholic Church of the North American Rite, the American
Catholic Church, et al. hovers in the background
of the case.
Dating back to the early 18th century at which
time it was created in Utrecht, Holland, as a result of a schism
with the Church of Rome over the local episcopacy, it claimsand
is accorded by some objective theological historiansgenuine
(if quite probably "illicit") apostolic succession.
The disassociation became more formal in 1873, following the
first Vatican Council's proclamation of papal infallibility in
1870; a manifestation of this being the consecration, by the
Old Catholic prelate of Deventer, of Prof. Joseph Reinkens of
Bonn, establishing a new wing to the free-flying offspring.
An itinerant preacher named Vilatte arrived
in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1884, professing Presbyterianism,
but soon attempted to induce the entrenched Protestant Episcopal
Bishop Brown to join him in the establishment of an Old Catholic
diocese. His suggestion was rejected. However, soon afterward
he did achieve an Old Catholic consecration from Bishop Herzog
of Berne, Switzerland, on June 6-7, 1885. Vilatte's adventures
were many, culminating in his additional consecration, through
the good offices of the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, in the
Independent Catholic Church of Ceylon, Goa, and India.
In 1904, a branch of the Old Catholic movement,
which was later to be known as the Catholic Church of North America,
was instituted in Wisconsin by William Henry Francis (Brothers).
During the following forty years he wandered in and out of the
more and less legitimate areas of church activity and in 1940
settled in Woodstock, New York. One of Bishop Arnold Harris Mathew's
successors excommunicated him from Old Catholicism in 1944 and
he finally accepted ordination into the Russian Orthodox Catholic
Church in America in 1962.
The most apostolically valid Old Catholic Church
in this country arrived just prior to World War I in the august
person of Rudolph Francis Edward St. Patrick Alphonsus Ghislain
de Gramont Hamilton de Lorraine Barbant, Prince de Landas Berghes,
et deRache et Duc et Winsock, who was consecrated by Arnold Harris
Mathew, Count Provoleri di Vicenza, du jour Earl of Llandaff,
Regionary Old Catholic Bishop of England, Archbishop of London,
etc. The Vilatte, as well as the Ferrette, Hereford, and other
claimant lines are generally questioned. However, through one
or more channels, almost too complicated to understand, let alone
explain, and, in terms of apostolic successionwhich constituted
its assertions of "legitimacy" the Church in
the United States was concentrated and consecrated in the holy
vessels of Carmel Henry Cafora and William Henry Francis. From
the former, clergy spewed forth; the latter had his ordinational
fling and then retired, some thirty years ago, to a charming
Woodstock mountaintop and built a rarely visited church.
In its modern history the church has had many
schisms of its own. The World Almanac lists various denominations
as having 83,000, 62,000, and 4,300 followers, but these self-estimates
are probably grossly exaggerated. Nonetheless, some of these
fragments are quite sincere and rather ordinary. Others are not.
One network of the Old Catholic Church, concentrated
in the East and the South (although it also has its advocates
in the Southwest), is totally controlled and peopled by homosexuals.
The small congregations are homosexual, the priests are homosexual,
the bishops are homosexual. David Ferrie and others involved
in the case were practitioners, priests or prelates in one or
more of these tentacles of the body Old Catholic. Others were
members of the clergy of offbeat Protestant sects, just as conservative
in their philosophy as many of the "serious" Old Catholic
hierarchy.
A last point should be made before we return
to other activities of "Bishop" Martin. This overwhelmingly
homosexual segment of the Old Catholic Church is closely allied
with peripheral factions of the Russian Orthodox Church and the
Eastern Orthodox Church (exchanging ordinations and consecrations
with each on occasion). Needless to say, the ties of both, especially
the Russian Orthodox Church, to the White Russian community are
very close.
Ferrie himself was never an actual priest.
Reports indicate that, nominated by Bishop George A. Hyde, once
of Washington, D.C., he was to have been ordained, in Kankakee,
Illinois, on July 19, 1963, but that Church officials, informed
that Ferrie had been arrested on charges of homosexual activities,
canceled the ritual of installation. There seems little doubt
that it was the arrest which disconcerted the clergy, not the
homosexuality, since one of the churchmen involved was once widely
talked about in the Church for having run an advertisement for
that-wayward souls in One, the well-known homophile publication.
This rejection severely disappointed Ferrie
and he seems to have accorded himself the rank of priest. Had
he known where to look, he could have bought an ordination for
a very moderate donation to the purse of a well-known Old Catholic
clergyman.
However, returning to Jack Martin
Originally he had called Assistant District
Attorney Herman S. Kolhman in the late 1963 and told him that
Ferrie had known Oswald. Interviewed by Garrison, he revealed
that the two had been friends and that Ferrie had instructed
Oswald in the use of a rifle with a telescopic sight. Shortly
afterward supposedly he told the Secret Service and the FBI separately
that the story was not true. These reports as well as related
information, consisting of about sixteen pages, were finally
declassified in September, 1965; forty others on Ferrie are still
"classified" and are unobtainable.
Martin, who appears to have been born in Phoenix,
Arizona, around 1915, and variously sports the titles "Colonel,"
"Bishop," and simple "Mister," is said to
consider himself a writer, journalist, soldier, adventurer, and
philosopher. On one occasion he suggested that Oswald had been
put into a hypnotic trance state by Ferrie, who then imposed
a posthypnotic order to go to Dallas and kill the President.
More important is his claim that he never told
any type of federal investigator that his first story was untrue.
He certainly manifested apprehension when Ferrie died, expressing
fear for his own life and fleeing the city for some time.
The most startling posthumous "revelation"
regarding David Ferrie came to public attention in mid-August,
1968, when the Rev. Raymond Broshears, who had roomed with the
late pilot some three years earlier, stated on a Los Angeles
television program: (11)
"David admitted being involved with the
assassins. There's no question about that." Broshears said
Ferrie "was in Houston at the time Mr. Garrison has him
in Houston, with an airplane waiting." According to the
minister the alleged conspirator was supposed to pilot two of
the actual assassins on the second stage of an escape flight
which would eventually carry them, by way of South America, to
South Africa, with which the United States had no extradition
treaty (and to which the CIA front operation Permindex moved
when it was asked to leave Europe).
Ferrie, recalls Rev. Broshears, was in readiness
at the Houston airport the afternoon of the murder, but the assassins,
flying a light plane, panicked and attempted to make it all the
way to some point in Mexico non-stop. They crashed off the coast
of Corpus Christi, Texas, and perished, according to the minister's
recounting of the Ferrie confession. Like Gordon Novel, the minister
holds that the purported escape pilot was murdered. "No
matter what happens I will never commit suicide," Broshears
remembers him saying.
Rev. Broshears, an admitted homosexual, tells
of having been subjected to almost constant threats and harassments
since his brief relationship with David Ferrie; however, in at
least one instance, he somewhat aggravated the situation. In
his words: "I said that Mr. Johnson who was responsible,
directly or indirectly, for the assassination of President Kennedy
should be put to death."
A low requiem mass was said for David William
Ferrie at St. Matthias' Church, on March 1. Only two mourners
attended. Interment followed in near solitude at St. Bernard's
Memorial Cemetery. His body was claimed by Parmalee T. Ferrie
of Rockford, New York, understood to be a brother. Two
weeks later the press reported in an isolated three-inch item
that attorney John P. Nelson, Jr., representing J. T. Ferrie
of Rockford, Illinois, also identified as a brother (the
same or another?) had petitioned for a search for a will.
Among Ferrie's final possessions were found
four rifles, an assortment of shotgun shells and .22 rifle blanks,
a radio transmitter tuning unit, two Signal Corps field telephones,
a 100-pound aerial-type practice bomb anda sword.
No one wrote an epitaph for this melancholy
puppet of phantasy and fate. No one, that is, save the man he
must have feared. Jim Garrison, almost a year afterward, recalled:

I had nothing but pity for Dave Ferrie while
he was alive, and I have nothing but pity for him now that he's
dead. Ferrie was a pathetic and tortured creature, a genuinely
brilliant man whose twisted drives locked him into his own private
hell. If I had been able to help Ferrie, I would have; but he
was in too deep and he was terrified. From the moment he realized
we had looked behind the facade and established that Lee Oswald
was anything but a Communist, from the moment he knew we had
discovered the role of the CIA and anti-Castro adventurers in
the assassination, Ferrie began to crumble psychologically. So,
to answer your question directlyyes, I suppose I may have
been responsible for Ferrie's death. If I had left this case
alone, if I had allowed Kennedy's murderers to continue to walk
the streets of America unimpeded, Dave Ferrie would probably
be alive today. I don't feel personally guilty about Ferrie's
death, but I do feel terribly sorry for the waste of another
human being. In a deeper sense, though, Dave Ferrie died on November
22, 1963. From that moment on, he couldn't save himself, and
I couldn't save him. Ferrie could have quoted as his epitaph
the last words of the Serb partisan leader Draja Mikhailovitch
before Tito shot him for collaboration: "I was swept up
in the gales of history." (12)

The man was dead and his playthings had
not been put away gently; they had not been put away at all,
but lay scattered about the flat like the shrapnel of a demolished
personality.
Through the parlor doors is a dust-filmed dining
room, with a set of scarlet-and-white false teeth on a walnut
sideboard, a model airplane with no propeller, a cheap plaster
head of the Virgin, and a college pennant.
The kitchen is peeling, scratched and rusty
looking. Fragments of cosmetics still clutter the bathroom. At
the foot of Ferrie's bed hangs a large crucifix; the remainder
of the chamber seems all bed.
The final room reflects his intellectual interests,
and their number and variety is evident. Hundreds of booksclassics,
novels, poetry, histories, biographies, legal tomes, texts of
chemistry, physics, mathematics, and languages, detective stories,
social and political tracts, and books on the acquisition of
power. Two microscopes, a telescope, a mimeograph machine, barbells,
and countless other seemingly disconnected items.
However, to the world he leftvoluntarily
or otherwisethese shards of David Ferrie are only a pile
of grubby junk. For notwithstanding Garrison's appraisal that
he "was one of history's most important individuals,"
the truth is that at most he was an incidental catalyst, and
it is not usually the motivator we remember, but the motivated,
not the theoretician, but the men who act. This was no Brutus,
no Essex, no Burrthis was a twisted, hating, emotionally
corrupted phantasizer, costumed in false eyebrows and a bright
red wig, probably dreaming of a place in the constellation of
some historic conspiracy.
David Ferrie was a pawn who thought he was
a bishop, who sought the ultimate coup, the taking of the king.
He forgot that pawns go, bishops go, and even rooks and queens,
but, win or lose, the king alone remains upon the tessellated
board of human history.

11 New York Free Press, August 15,
1968. Report of a Los Angeles television interview by Stan Bohrman.
12 Playboy, October, 1967.

from pages 145 & 146

Marina Oswald, who three years later was
to become the Warren Commission's most important "prosecution
witness" against Lee Oswald, plays an important and frequently
enigmatic role in his life. Little attention has been accorded
Marina's life before she married the defectorand
the question is rarely raised, why did she marry him?
Marina was born on July 17, 1941, at Severodvinsk
in the Archangel area of northern Russia, the illegitimate daughter
of Klavidya Vasilievna Prusakova. Two years after her mother's
death, in 1957, the eighteen-year-old Marina moved to Minsk to
live with her uncle, Col. Ilya Prusakov, a member of the Communist
Party (restricted to the upper few percent of political elite
in the USSR) and a prominent officer of the KGB. The Warren Report
specified: "The Prusakovs had one of the best apartments
in a building reserved for MVD employees." (The initials
KGB and MVD are used interchangeably to designate the Soviet
Secret Police.)
The Warren Report added that during their courtship,
"Oswald visited Marina regularly at her aunt and uncle's
apartment: they were apparently not disturbed by the fact that
he was an American and did not disapprove of her seeing him..."
Either Colonel Prusakov was remarkably broadminded
for a senior official of the KGB or he was encouraging Marina
to cultivate Oswald's friendship for some purposes of his ownor
the KGB's. It should be remembered that from the day he announced
his "defection" in Moscow, Oswald was kept under surveillance
by a string of beautiful and cultured Intourist guides who spoke
perfect English and encouraged the boorish and unromantic Oswald
to squire them around Moscow to dinner, ballet, and the theaterin
clear violation of Intourist rules prohibiting social fraternization
with foreign tourists. Marina's interest in Lee Oswald may have
been perfectly sincere and spontaneousbut it can also be
viewed in another light.
Marina's biographer, Joachim Joesten, asks:

Did it ever strike the Warren Commission
as peculiar that Lee Harvey Oswald, an American and a former
Marine, at large in "enemy territory" under most questionable
circumstances, should have come to marry a girl who happened
to be the niece of a local top official in the secret police?
To be sure, the Commission, in its own words, "is aware
that many of the Soviet officials with whom Oswald came into
contact were employees of the KGB, the agency which has primary
jurisdiction for the treatment of defectors." This may be
news to Chief Justice Warren and his fellow commissioners, but
the KGB's primary jurisdiction does not lie with defectors, who
are few and far between in the Soviet Union. Rather, its principal
job is to keep a sharp eye on potential spies and saboteurs...(26)

Nothing in Marina's record indicates a genuine
fondness, much less love, for her husband. Two White Russian
friends of the Oswalds in Dallas, George and Jeanne De Mohrenshildt,
told the Warren Commission that "right in front" of
Oswald, Marina bemoaned his sexual inadequacy, and she complained
to her friend Ruth Paine that they only rarely had sexual intercourse
since Oswald "was not a man." Without any pangs of
remorse, or concern for the impact on her children, she blackened
his memory before the Warren Commission, even inventing stories,
such as Oswald's alleged attempt to assassinate Richard Nixon,
that were so fantastic the Commission was compelled to reject
them. In Mark Lane's words, "The case against Lee Harvey
Oswald was comprised essentially of evidence from two sources:
Dallas police officers and Marina Oswald." (27)
Even during their courtship Marina never evidenced anything approaching
a grand passion for Oswald; she never seemed even to like him.
Why then did she marry Lee Harvey Oswald? One possible explanation
is that she was an opportunist who wanted a free ticket to the
United States. Another is that she viewed Oswald not as a lover,
but as an assignment.

Another of the Warren Commission's conclusions
absolving Ruby of involvement in a plot, the fact that he was
too "moody and unstable" to ever have "encouraged
the confidence of persons involved in a sensitive conspiracy,"
(14) causes the prosecutor to burst into
a gale of derisive laughter. "I'm sure they would have preferred
a bishop of the Episcopal Church or a Nobel Prize winner, but
they made a pretty good choice in Ruby. At least, I don't see
Lee Harvey Oswald walking around today." (15)
Nor does Garrison find it peculiar that Ruby,
professedly a devout Jew, would cooperate in a conspiracy with
elements the district attorney designates as "neo-Nazi."
When asked what Ruby's motivation could be, Garrison replies
bluntly:
"Money. As far as my office has been able
to determine, Jack Ruby had no strong political views of his
own. Historically, of course, there have been a number of self-hating
Jews who abetted their own tormentors: Adolf Hitler's mentor
in Vienna, Karl Lueger ... but I don't believe Jack Ruby falls
into this category; he was just a hoodlum out for a buck. I will
saywith the understanding that it's pure speculationit's
not impossible that Jack Ruby developed certain guilt feelings
in prison over his role in the plot. Remember his repeated lament,
'Now there will be pogroms. They will kill all the Jews.'? Most
people assumed this was just the fantasy of a crumbling mind.
But maybe Jack Ruby knew better than the rest of us what the
master-racist authors of the assassination had in mind for the
country." (16)

Garrison's office also claimed that it had
unearthed evidence of three rendezvous between Shaw and Oswald
in small, rural Louisiana towns during the late summer of 1963.
The New Orleans States-Item then ran
a copyrighted story (11) by Hoke May,
David Snyder, Ross Yockey, and Rosemary James of its staff and
R. T. Endicott of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, which
began to crack the shell of denial regarding the CIA's involvement
in the case and with some of the principal participants. Gordon
Novel had already announced that he intended to hide behind the
cloak (and his famous "Mr. Weiss letter" suggested
even the dagger) of the Central Intelligence Agency in the face
of the looming Garrison inquiry. Now Shaw himself was seemingly
revealed as having connections with that mysterious department
of the United States government. Certainly he was associated
with two organizations which were widely identified by responsible
figures as being arms, fronts, or financial conduits for its
activities.
Rather than draw on the excellent, but necessarily
secondhand, report of the group of star journalists mentioned,
the author established communications with the original source,
the newspaper Paesa Sera of Rome. What follows is the
result of that line of inquiry.
There was established in Rome an organization
named the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. Its origins, functions,
rotating presidency, geographical displacements, sub-, subsequent,
and alternate designations, were so complex and labyrinthine
as to make a comprehensive and comprehensible description of
it in anything less than a moderate-sized book impossible. Nonetheless,
the essence of its activities can be sketched here, and as they
seem to deeply incorporate Clay Shaw, a former OSS colonel, Italian
Fascists, supporters of the far, paramilitary right in Europe,
the CIA, and other like subjects, it is vital that the fundamentals
of this situation be clarified as much as space and the entire
business' innate irreducible confusion permit.(12)
In 1959 another of the mysterious figures who
appear to comprise the major portion of the persons somehow related
to the investigation in New Orleans, a Hungarian, George Mandel,
at one point Italianized to Giorgio Mantello, created a Societa
Italo-Americana, the purpose of which was announced as industry
and commerce. On November 14 of that year he inaugurated what
Paesa Sera regards as his most important "creation,"
the Italo-American Hotel Corporation. Its stated object was the
construction of the Hotel du Lac of the EUR (Exposition Universale
Roma). The largest of its shareholders were three foreign credit
groups, "represented in Italy by the Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro, the De Famaco Astalde Vaduz (Swiss), the Miami Astalde
Vaduz (American), and the Seligman Bank of Basel. The De Famaco
and the Seligman institutions were among the most powerful stockholders
of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale." (13)
The CMC was founded in 1961. Spokesmen asserted
that it would function as an international commercial organization,
that it would aid in the establishing of a permanent exposition,
and generally assist concerns involved in trade. The staffing
was expansive, the offices elaborate, and it gave all the appearance
of being a rather grand operation.
The board of directors was interestingly assorted.
Several respected Italians were presentChristian Democrat
Deputy Mario Ceravolo and former Social Democrat Deputy Corrado
Bonfantini. Listed as president was Carlo D'Amelio, lawyer and
administrator of the former royal family's interests. The remainder
of the board consisted of non-Italian names. Swiss Minister Ernest
Feisst; Swiss Professor Max Hagemann, owner-editor of the newspaper
National Zeitung (not to be confused with the neo-Nazi German
National and Soldaten Zeitung); Hans Seligman-Schurch,
Basel banker; Professor Edgar Salin, president of the Faculty
of Economics at the University of Basel; Dr. Enrico Mantello,
brother of George Mandel (Mantello), the power behind the Societa
Italo-Americana; Ferenc Nagy, former Hungarian premier and erstwhile
leader of the anti-Communist Countryman's party, and president
of Permindex (the head office of the CMC); Prince Gutierez di
Spadafora, industrialist and landowner of oddly totalitarian
turn of mind, related through his daughter-in-law to Adolf Hitler's
notorious Minister of Finance, Hjalmar Schacht tried as a war
criminal at Nuremburg; and Clay L. Shaw, of New Orleans.(14)
Now what of these associates of the "old-fashioned
liberal of the Wilson-Roosevelt persuasion"? What kind of
persons did they seem to be? Again, space precludes a full examination
of each, or, for that matter, even a cursory individual analysis,
but we certainly can look into the background and activities
of a few.
First there is Giorgio Mantello (Mandel), a
Hungarian refugee, Austrian citizen, functioning in Italy, Switzerland,
and elsewhere with financial transactions reaching throughout
Europe, Africa, and America, who has, according to Paesa Sera,
been condemned for his "criminal activities" in
Switzerland. This latter revelation was originally carried in
the August 19, 1961, issue of the Basel newspaper A-Z,
which featured a report about directors of government agencies,
saying: "In many articles we have justly spoken of the criminal
activities of Messrs. [Ferenc] Nagy and Mantello." Mantello
initiated a suit against the Swiss journal, then abruptly abandoned
it, causing A-Z to observe: "Too bad; we would have
heard some great things at the trial." (15)
Ferenc Nagy was closely associated with Mantello
in his highly secret financial-political maneuverings. When Mantello
founded Permindex, the head office and other face of the Centro
Mondiale Commerciale, Nagy became its president. He was the Nagy
accused of "criminal activities" along with Mantello,
and identified by Swiss newspapers as a "dependent"
of the CMC in Rome.
"As president of Permindex, I would like
to thank the Italian government for the good will and sincere
interest shown toward our great undertaking, the permanent industrial
exposition and the CMC," orated Nagy, as the operation he
fronted began. It was all very grand and impressive, but to quote
Paesa Sera:
"The farce . . . reached the point of
the grotesque when the lawyer D'Amelio, praising Permindex as
'a capillary organization located in the principal centers of
production, with its head office [CMC] in Rome' (an organization,
all the while, virtually non-existent), brought all of Italian
civilization into play by affirming that thanks to the Centro
[CMC], 'Rome will recover once again her position as caput
mundi, as center of the civilized world.'"(16)
Actually it was soon to become evident that
the seemingly vast, mighty structure was not a rock of solidarity,
but a shell of superficiality; not constructed with mass, supporting
promise, but composed of channels through which money flowed
back and forth, with no one knowing the source or the destination
of these liquid assets.
Ferenc Nagy, who, while premier of Hungary,
was "compelled by Communists in key government positions
to expel from his party various of its members who had been arrested
for plotting . . . against the government,"(17)
and who, while on a trip to Switzerland on May 29, 1947, telephoned
his resignation to Budapest, moved in shadowy areas of finance
and politics. "President of Permindex and Board Member of
the CMC," reports Paesa Sera, " [he] was said
by the French press to be a munificent contributor to the philo-fascistic
movement of [Jacques] Soustelle, and [a] patron of far-right
movements throughout Europe, including Italy." (18)
Certainly one is led to wonder why, of all
the hundreds of nations on earth, Nagy ended up in the United
States; and why of all the thousands of cities in the United
States, Nagy ended up in Dallas. For that is where the violently
right-oriented, GAS-financing, president of Permindex and board
member of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale did end up, in the
city that boasted the infamous "Wanted for Treason"
manifesto, which accused Kennedy of being a Communist; in the
city where the President was assassinatedin Dallas.
These were two of liberal Clay Shaw's associates
in his European activities.
Prince Gutierez di Spadafora, Undersecretary
of Agriculture in Mussolini's Fascist government, was another.
After his wartime achievements he turned his talents to his vast
landholdings and commerce, especially to the establishment of
a corporation, with himself as president, which constructed a
huge refinery at Milazzo, in Messina, Sicily. He is also president
of the Sicilian Compagnia Armatrice Industriale Petrolifera Armatoriale,
which is involved with arms and oil. The prince also owns what
is reputed to be the largest hothouse in the world, in Pachino,
Syracuse. The more than a hundred employees were for some time
supervised by "landsmen" from his feudal estates in
Valle d'Olma and Mussomeli, in the province of Caltanissetta
who rode about in velvet jackets and high black boots, with fancy
revolvers flashing from their belts. According to Paesa Sera
"the Syracusans, unaccustomed to these Mafia-like habits,
held a great general strike in protest, in December, 1962, and
the Mafiosi of the Prince were forced to return" to his
more feudal properties.
The Centro Mondiale Commerciale boasted another
interesting name in its background. He is Giuseppe Zigiotti,
president of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms.
"Another fact which may help us understand
certain things about the personalities around the CMC,"
said Paesa Sera, "is the presence in this group of
H. Simonfay, Hungarian refugee, who directs BO-DA, an agency
for provocative information from and for the socialistic countries.
He is director in Italy of ACEN (specializing in hostile activities
on the confrontations of socialist countries), who had an important
position in the field of public relations for the CMC, for which
he received a secret fee of half a million lire a month."
(19)
However, no behind-the-scenes figure is more
intriguing than Maj. L. M. Bloomfield, formerly of the American
OSS, and later suspected by Jim Garrison of having some affiliation
with the CIA.
On July 21, 1961, Giorgio Mantello appeared
at the Italian Assembly representing all the stockholders of
the CMC. These included himself, his brother Enrico, another
Hungarian refugee, Joseph Slifka and Fellender Erwin, banker
Hans Seligman, and lawyer Carlo D'Amelio . . . . holder of 500,000
lire worth of shares. And Major L. M. Bloomfield, who held half
the shares or 250 million, for party or parties unknown.(20)
Now obviously the activities of these Shaw
associates were closely orchestrated, considering the financial-political
manipulator Mantello was permitted to represent not only himself
but the six other stockholders of the CMC, including Bloomfield,
former United States espionage agent and now a banker in Montreal,
who is reputed to control Le Credit Suisse of Canada, Heineken's
Breweries, Canscot Realty, the Israel Continental Company, the
Grimaldi Siosa Lines, Ltd., etc.(21)
Even Montreal is not without significance,
for to quote the Canadian journal Le Devoir:
"But here is where the affair assumes
stranger and stranger characteristics. It has just been learned
that the name of Clay Shaw was found among that of eleven directors
of a company which, up until 1962, had its headquarters in
Montreal [italics added] . . . [presently] in Rome, it is
known as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale . . ." (22)
Shortly thereafter, while alluding to other
directors, Le Devoir reports:
"Ferenc Nagy, exiled head of the Hungarian
Peasants Party . . . maintains close ties with the CIA and which
link him with the Miami Cuban colony." Also listed are the
previously mentioned Fascist Giuseppe Zigiotti, Bloomfield, and
an Egyptian, Faruk Churbagi.
This particular episode is worthy of mention
for various reasons, not the least of which is its exemplifying
of some of the tactics which seem as common to forces behind
the CMC and its activities as to those of other forces halfway
around the world.
The CMC or the Italo-American Hotel Corporation
(into which part of the former turned) are, relates Paesa
Sera, "also linked to other names which have appeared
recently in the yellow press; another sign that, taking part
in the same groups as the CMC and its former members, are persons
who are quite suspect.
"One of these persons is Faruk Churbagi,
the young Lebanese-Egyptian industrialist who was killed in Rome
under still unexplained circumstances. It is said in groups around
the former CMC that shortly before he was killed, the young man
had turned over 200 million lire as dues for participation in
the activities of the Centro . . . ."
And then there was the German Christa Wanniger,
connected to the CMC by business dealings and "personal
friendships," who was stabbed to death in Via Veneto under
[apparently inevitably] unexplained circumstances." (23)
However, to return to areas of CMC endeavors
about which a fragment or two more is known.Le Devoir elaborates on Bloomfield,
noting that he was active in the espionage arm of the U.S. government
during World War II and "was at the time the principal shareholder
in a society having headquarters in Switzerland and affiliated
with the Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome, known as Permindex.
Other shareholders in Permindex were banks of a more or less
shadowy character with headquarters in Liechtenstein, plus Miami
Astaldo Vaduz, De Famaco Vaduz, and the Credit Bank of Geneva.
Among the directors, the name of Max Hagemann was noted, director
of the National Zeitung, a newspaper specializing in anti-Communist
diatribes. Whatever the case may be, the Centro Commerciale and
Permindex got into difficulties with the Italian and Swiss governments.
They refused to testify to the origins of considerable amounts
of money, the sources of which are, to say the least, uncertain,
and they never seemed to engage in actual commercial transactions.
These companies were expelled from Switzerland and Italy in 1962
and then set up headquarters in Johannesburg." (24)
Another individual described by Paesa Sera
as a "high level financial backer" was one Dr.
David Biegun, "national secretary of the National Committee
for Labor Israel, Inc., whose offices are in New York. Biegun
was the person who actually handled the liquidation of the agency
(CMC), receiving considerable credit for this, though officially
'unknown to the banks.' " (25)

"A short time [after its inauguration],"
reports Paesa Sera, when the enormous Centro began to
show the true face of its organization with very precise goals,
which were anything but commercial, certain persons in Parliament
became interested. Odo Spadazzi presented the question to the
Chamber. But when the news came out, Spadazzi quickly withdrew.
Shortly thereafter, he became [the new] president of the CMC.

While under the presidency of Spadazzi,
the Centro was again questioned by the Christian Democrat Mario
Ceravolo, who asked for an accounting of all of the activities
of the Centro. Ceravolo, a member of the CMC's Board of Directors.
. . had been a member of the board since its founding. Since
then, he had seen money spent left and right, and had also seen
that no commercial activities were being concluded. He wanted
to know where the money was going and where it was coming from,
but could get no accurate response. At this point, in 1962, he
returned [sic; resigned?] from the board and directly
demanded the bankruptcy of the Centro, obtaining a confiscation
of two million lire.(26)

The Centro's attorneys immediately assured
one and all that "the CMC is straightening itself out"
and was "now in the process of complete recovery."
A recovery which never occurred.
It was these curious and mostly untraceable
manipulations which led Ceravolo to make public the following
letter:

I refer to the article concerning Clay Shaw
which appeared in your paper [Paesa Sera] of 4 March 1967.
My name was mentioned therein.
To avoid misunderstandings and false interpretations,
I ask that you please publish the fact that I left the administrative
board of the CMC on 25 July 1962 because it was no longer possible
to understand the sources of great sums of money obtained abroad
by Mr. Giovanni [Giorgio] Manteilo, and the real destination
of this money.
I was the first to call for the bankruptcy
of the CMC and of Mr. Mantello, which paid their representatives,
administrators, employees, etc. according to their own pleasure.
The magistrate did not wish to grant the request for bankruptcy
which I, first of all, presented against the Centro.(27)

The letter is clear, and so is the question
it poses. Who was giving virtually unlimited sums of money to
the CMC and who was getting it? And for what?
In less than five years of activities which
seemed to begin nowhere, go nowhere, and accomplish little or
nothing, while receiving from unnamed sources and delivering
to anonymous persons and causes vast sums of money, the CMC found
reason to change its presidents or directors ten times, or on
an average of every six months, although the men controlling
its destinieswhatever they may beare always the same.
"Among its possible involvements (supported by the presence
in directive posts of men deeply committed to European organizations
of the extreme right)," comments Paesa Sera, "is
that the Centro was a creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover
for the transfer of CIA . . . funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage
activities. It still remains to clear up the presence on the
administrative board of the CMC of Clay Shaw and ex-Major Bloomfield."
(28)
"It is a fact," the newspaper subsequently
commented, "that the CMC . . . is nevertheless the point
of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects,
have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is an anticommunism
so strong that it would swallow up all those in the world who
have fought for decent relations between East and West, including
Kennedy." (29)
A mysterious financial manipulator and a former
Hungarian premier who supported the military right-wing GAS,
kept close ties with the CIA and went halfway around the world
to live in Dallas, both of whom were accused of "criminal
activities" by the Swiss press. These are two of Shaw's
European associates. A former member of Mussolini's cabinet,
father-in-law to the daughter of Hitler cabinet minister Hjalmar
Schacht, and the leader of a national Fascist organization. Two
more who sat on the CMC board with Shaw. A mysterious ex-spy
and a man who resigns from the organization out of conscience.
Two more of Shaw's companions in business in Rome.
Surely a strange assortment of colleagues for
an "old-fashioned liberal of the Wilson-Roosevelt persuasion."
But then, the Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex are curious
operations, as has become evident.
Clay Shaw's name first appeared in the Rome
newspapers in relationship to the CMC on February 14, 1962, in
Paesa Sera, but, as that journal itself said, his "name
did not have, at the time, any particular significance."
Later that was to alter, of course.
"There have been great repercussions from
the revelations of Paesa Sera," remarked that publication
in its March 6, 1967, issue, "concerning the connection
between Clay Shaw, the man incriminated by D.A. Garrison in the
Kennedy assassination, and the World Trade Center (CMC) which
was [until] recently working in Rome. The information we published
was amply followed up by all the Italian dailies. Il Giorno
of Milan, La Gazette del Popolo of Turin, De La Sera
in Rome, even Il Tempo, which wrote 'the businessman accused
by D.A. Garrison was among the administrators of the CMC . .
. .' " (30)
". . . the lawyer d'Amelio," continued
Paesa Sera, ". . . confirmed Shaw's presence on the
administrative board of the CMC at the time he [d'Amelio] was
its President." Subsequently d'Amelio called Shaw "the
inventor" of this type of commercial organization. Unfortunately,
no one seemed to know quite what kind of organizations the CMC
and Permindex were. One of the few things public about themif
one lookedwas that Clay Shaw of New Orleans was a member
of both of their boards.
"D'Amelio has tried to justify Shaw's
presence (in the CMC and on its Board of Directors)," says
the newspaper, "by the fact that Shaw 'had organized in
New Orleans a permanent trade exhibit like the one which we wanted
to set up in Rome,' and therefore 'through courtesy, we offered
Shaw a position on the administrative board.'
"D'Amelio did not speak of the activities
of Ferenc Nagy who, through the CMC's head office, Permindex,
had financed [Jacques] Soustelle and the OAS; he did not know
that several Swiss newspapers had called the activities of Nagy
and Mandel [Mantello] 'criminal'; and he did not speak of the
completion of the CMC (nor could he, since [in terms of its publicly
announced intentions]) this has turned out to be nothing but
a tremendous failure." (31)
On March 14 Paesa Sera observed that
Clay Shaw had "confirmed everything" it had reported
regarding his European alliances. "That is to say,"
it wrote, "that he has declared that he had been, in effect,
administrative adviser to the CMC. Shaw, however, has tried to
minimize the importance of this, saying that he had accepted
the position 'in exchange two New Orleans-Rome airline tickets.'
" (32)
Comments Paesa Sera: "According
to American sources, Shaw left the U.S. two days after the assassination
of Kennedy and came to Europe, visiting, among other places,
Italy." (33)
Further, it reports, "Clay Shaw, by his
own admission, came to Rome during the time preceding the disbanding
of the CMC."
Two enigmatic organizations, shadowy figures
of finance, neo-Nazi, Fascist individuals manipulating interests
in various areas including arms and oil, untold funds from unnamed
origins funneled to unspecified endsthe information piles
higher and higher, and one senses that one has barely begun to
climb the mountain of mystery atop which these men sit and direct
their unknown acts to unknown ends. However, to sum up very briefly
Clay Shaw's role in this extraordinary drama, a final quote from
Paesa Sera of March 6, 1967.

It is certain that Clay Shaw, who was arrested
in New Orleans . . . (and, therefore, whether on true grounds
or not, is a person who is certainly not limited to the quiet
pursuit of his profession as a director of industry, but who
must therefore have his finger in the pies of it is not clear
what political activities) had a position on the board of the
CMC in Rome.
It is certain that the CMC (taking advantage
of the good faith of d'Amelio and of other Italians who were
involved in that disastrous enterprise) has not fulfilled any
of the activities for which it was originally projected.
It is certain that an important shareholder
in the CMC was an ex-official of the American service.
Concerning the CMC and the organizations formed
by Mandel, it is not clear on whose account many Hungarian refugees
who were implicated in espionage activities were working, nor
through what agencies large financial dealings in European political
movements have been taking place.(34)

It was stated at the beginning of this examination
of Clay Shaw's European participations and alliances that the
entire matter of the CMC, Permindex, and the various presidents,
directors, members of the boards, shareholders, theoretical and
actual intentions, extra- and inter-organizational financial
manipulations, far- and military-right sponsorings, and so forth,
was so complicated as to require a book to cover what is known
about these subjects, and that, even then, the most one could
draw from would be iceberg visibility. However, it was felt that
to understand anything of this strange man, Clay L. Shaw of New
Orleans, and who knows where, the simple two-dimensional sketch
offered to the public should be given the depth a more concrete
mass of material would reveal.
One last point must be noted before we leave
this particular area of inquiry. Seeking more information regarding
the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, the author telephoned the office
of the Italian Consul General in New York. After having received
silence in response to requests for information in three successive
steps, the author was turned over to an apparent superior. When
the question "What can you tell me about the CMC in Rome?"
was put, for the fourth time, to a man whom the entire series
of exchanges indicated to be of considerable authority, he replied:
"Why don't you contact the American Embassy?" "The
American Embassy?" echoed the author, not a little surprised
at the candidness implied. "The American Embassy in Rome,"
the anonymous informant repeated. "But we are interested
in the CMC as seen from the Italian perspective," the author
explained. "Try the American Embassy, I can't help you any
further." The gentleman was thanked for his assistance and
the conversation concluded.(35)
In New Orleans, Clay L. Shaw is a distinguished
citizen.
In Rome he was a key member of the boards of
two highly recondite, clandestine organizations, numbering among
his colleagues persons accused of "criminal activities"
on an international level, Fascists, and victims of European
assassinations.
Are they, in any way, reconcilable images?
The complexity of Shaw's associations does
not end with the Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex, but
extends deeply into his personal relationships in Europe. His
private address and telephone book, for example, carries the
name and address of the wife of a well-known English Fascist,
as well as the name, address, and private telephone number of
Principessa Marcelle Borghese (now Duchessa de Bomartao), who
is related to Prince Valerio Borghese,
sometimes referred to as "the Black Prince," or "the
New Duce," leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the
anti-British, anti-American neo-Fascist organization. The prince
was a much-decorated midget-submarine commander during the war,
following which he was tried and sentenced to twelve years in
prison for cooperating with the Nazis after the Italian armistice
with the Allies was signed. However, as he had spent four years
in jail awaiting trial, after sentencing, the remaining prison
period was suspended.(36)
To return to the happenings in New Orleans.